STEFAN GEORGE AND HIS CIRCLE 157
mos; for it is close-visioned as shape and heard as the harmony of
the divine purpose. The poet's mind thus fixed and functioning is
itself the universe as it was, as it is and ever shall be, and the sense
of existence sings itself into floating rhythms that shape them-
selves to the very feeling of the ideas they convey and wed them-
selves to the inner melody of the ever-moving cosmos.
RUDOLF PANNWITZ (i88i- ) described his development in his
Grnndriss einer Geschichte meiner Kultur (1921) and explained the
aims of the Charontiker in his Kultur> Kraft, Kunst (1906). He parted
from zur Linde because he had come to the conclusion that in the
Charontic style there was formlessness due to the rejection of the
culture of Greece and Rome (die Antike}. He then returned to his
previous allegiance to Stefan George and adopted the Georgean
orthography with small letters for nouns and scant punctuation.
His work, which covers a vast range, is at first densely obscure
but clears gradually, and there is still a following for his abstruse
metaphysical and mythical poems, in which, in the wake of Nietz-
sche, Otto zur Linde, and Stefan George, he probes a way to a
new cosmic Mythos, as in his epics Das Kind Aion (1919), My then
(in ten parts, 1919-22), Episches Zeitgedicht (1919), Das Geheimnis
(1922) and Die Trilogie desl^ebens (1929). Pannwitz is himself with
his remote personality a mythical figure; from 1921 to 1948 he
lived the life of a recluse on a Dalmatian island, and here his
mature works were completed. In the drama he is represented by
Dionysiscbe Tragodien (1913), TSaldurs ^^(1919), and then Pbilolethes
and Orpheus (1922). His lyric verse is best studied in Urblick (1926)
and his selection Landschaft-Gedichte (1954), to which he has at-
tached an interpretative Nachmrt. The best known of his narrative
prose works are Orplid(K)z$) and his 'Bildungs- und Erziehungs-
roman' Das new Leben, which attempts the scope of Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister. Of his paedagogical and philosophical works the
most important is DieKrisisder europaiscbenKttltur (1917), *n which
he interprets Greek tragedy, French classicism, Shakespeare and
Byron and adumbrates the possibility of a culturally united Eur-
ope, a cnew European cultural humanity', an idea which is also
the base of his Deutschland und Europa (1918) and Die deutsche Idee
Europa (1931). His dithyrambic Die deutsche Lebre (1919), Nietz-
schean with Stefan George's devices, might be taken to be spread-
ing Nazi ideology at a time when Hitler was still a brooding
ex-Feldwebel.